Here we have this picture of Valjean and those with a similar plight as a man overboard and abandoned at sea. The infinite sea beneath him, the infinite sky above, he swims for hours on end to no avail. He cries out to God. To anyone. To anything. Alas, there is nobody, nothing that responds. No help is coming. Valjean got in the way of “progress” and has been abandoned to a system that leaves him no hope. It is not a system that tries to make him more fit for life on the ship, or seeks to find him a safe harbor somewhere out of the way. It is one that abandons and destroys, extinguishing hope utterly and completely. Hugo calls this existential place Valjean finds himself in an “unfathomable waste of misery” and poses the question “can anyone revive the corpses” created by this dehumanizing process?
Similar to the last chapter, this metaphor is apt, and is honestly more depressing in it’s force because of the realization that for all the progress we have made, this has only become more of a problem. Mass incarceration is not on the decline, it is something that continues to increase as the larger system seeks to press society into it’s desired productive shape. Some of those caught up in it’s wheels are not guilty at all, and those who are in no way deserve the kind of treatment that befalls them in this horrifying system.